Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Victory Declared in Michigan for Wolves and Voter Rights

November 4, 2014

With more than 50 percent of votes reported statewide and strong
margins on both measures, Keep Michigan Wolves Protected has declared
victory in defeating Proposals 1 and 2 in the November 4 election.

Jill
Fritz, director of Keep Michigan Wolves Protected and Michigan senior
state director for The Humane Society of the United States, said: “The
citizens of Michigan have voted by wide margins to reject both laws
enacted by the legislature, not only rejecting wolf hunting but also the
attempt to transfer authority to the Natural Resources Commission to
declare hunting seasons on protected species.”

The legislature
passed a third law in August that is a duplicate of Proposal 2, and Keep
Michigan Wolves Protected says the voters’ verdict has implications for
future action on wolves.

“The resounding rejection of Proposal 2
is an unmistakable signal to the NRC to terminate any plans in 2015 for
a wolf hunt,” added Fritz. “The public does not accept its authority to
make such a declaration. It’s now time for lawmakers and the NRC to
heed the will of the people. The people of Michigan don’t want the
trophy hunting of wolves, they don’t want more legislative tricks, and
they don’t want to cede authority to an unelected group of political
appointees. The NRC should honor the judgment rendered by voters come
2015, regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit to nullify the third
wolf-hunting bill enacted by the legislature.”

Background:

While the legislature passed yet a third law in August to duplicate
Proposal 2, and included an unrelated appropriation to block a
referendum, Keep Michigan Wolves Protected plans to challenge this law
in court as unconstitutional. If a court strikes down that law, the
defeat of Proposals 1 and 2 will confirm the non-game status of wolves
and will return the power to designate game species to the legislature
so citizens can maintain a check and balance on its future actions.
Existing laws allowing the effective management of problem wolves will
not be affected.

This is the latest in a series of battles over wolves and wildlife
policy, and the issue won’t be settled for a long time. Besides the
expected litigation over the unconstitutional law passed in August,
there is also pending litigation to restore federal Endangered Species
Act protections to the Great Lakes wolf population, which would affect
the ability of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin to authorize wolf
hunting and trapping seasons.

In the last two years, more than 2,200 wolves have been killed
across Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Wisconsin and Wyoming for
sport – many of them with painful steel-jawed leghold traps and chased
to death by packs of hounds.

This was the first statewide vote on wolf hunting in any state since
wolves were stripped of their federal protections. Decision makers
across the Great Lakes and Northern Rockies should pay attention to this
vote in Michigan, and see how regular citizens feel about the trophy
hunting and trapping of wolves.

Proposal 1 would have established a trophy hunting and trapping
season on wolves in Michigan. Proposal 2 would have granted the state’s
Natural Resources Commission the authority to designate wolves and other
animals as game species to be hunted and trapped, without oversight by
legislators or voters. Proposal 2 was passed by the legislature for the
sole reason of circumventing a citizen vote on Proposal 1.

Keep Michigan Wolves Protected is grateful for the tireless
dedication of hundreds of volunteers who collected nearly 500,000
signatures in two petition drives, often in brutally cold weather, to
place Proposals 1 and 2 on the ballot. It is the people of Michigan,
from Marquette to Traverse City to Kalamazoo to Detroit, who achieved
this victory for their wolves.

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone